After a successful hot-fire test on June 25, 2008, the SpaceX team looks forward to their upcoming launch window opening on August 1 and lasting until August 5.

This time they will have valuable payloads atop their Falcon 1 rocket, powered the first time by the regenerative cooled Merlin-1C engine. The primary payload will be the US Department of Defense's Trailblazer satellite while secondary payloads will be from NASA.

PRESAT and NANOSAIL-D, both built by Santa Clara University, will be atop a payload adapter needed later this year for the Malaysian Razaksat mission. PRESAT is designed to â€ževaluate the performance of a generic biofluidic sample management and handling system for future advanced in situ spaceborne biology experiments.â€œ

NANOSAIL-D will demonstrate a solar sail. Its mission directive says â€ždeploy a solar sail that also will be used as a drag sail to demonstrate orbital debris mitigation technology.â€œ

The launch will occur from from the Reagan Test Site, Omelek Island, Kwajalein Atoll, in the Pacific same to the first two launches in 2006 and 2007. While the first launch failed due to corrosion of a nut only seconds after liftoff, the second flight saw a successful staging and a long second stage burn, only prematurely ended due to fuel sloshing.

haha, showing your forum age now i remember the SpaceShipOne flight also, also sat on this forum hitting refresh every 5 seconds! Great times! much better coverage than BBC News!

With regards to you guys getting "Feelings" i am there with you, should be some great events coming up, where we will be sat back here again wandering whats happening! I think the closest to that lately has been the Armadillo Flights. Another day where update seemed to be getting posted all over the place as to how they were doing! Roll on '08/09, much more fun to come!

Launching a rocket at a specific time is more difficult as to just launch when everything is triple-checked and ready for launch, especially for such a test/development flight.

When you review rocket launches they were often delayed by minutes to hours, so they define a launch window where the rocket still can put the satellite into the proper orbit and the launch range is available.

_________________"The hardest hurdle to space isn't the technicalities and money. But rather, the courage and the will to do it." - Burt Rutan.

As far as I know he got it from one of the University teams. Regarding news: SpaceX is nonetheless one of the most public rocket companies in the world. As this is still a test/development launch one can't expect a fixed launch date like for an Ariane rocket that is "flying like a clockwork".

SpaceX will give notice before the launch, at least several hours before when they feel they are ready for the launch. They just don't want to give false alarms and want to triple- or quadruple-check that they have done everything for a successful launch.

In my opionion this launch is extremely important. They have to show a basically fully functional rocket. I would say the only "failure" allowed would be a somewhat wrong orbit (a bit too high, too low) but the rocket itself has to show this time that it works.

Otherwise they will get in problems regarding the timetable for NASA's COTS program.

But I'm confident that they get the next steps done this time, last launch was not that bad in my eyes as some (of other companies?) talk or wish it. You can re-watch the second Falcon 1 launch btw on SpaceX's website while waiting: